


into seas without a shore

by allucinora



Category: Dark Artifices Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post-Book 1: Lady Midnight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 20:41:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6535534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allucinora/pseuds/allucinora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of Lady Midnight, Julian tries to cope with a broken heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	into seas without a shore

Julian stared at the crashing waves, which glimmered a mercurial blue in the dimming light. Normally this stretch of sand would be filled with noise; gulls shrieking overhead, kids playing in the shallow water, people laughing and talking. But today he was sitting alone, staring out at the empty, endless ocean. The sun was drowning over the horizon, and the salt wind was turning cold as the day faded.

Emma. Emma. Emma. He named each wave after her, loved each one as they rose and foamed, hated them as they fell and vanished. He matched her name to his heartbeat, felt the cadence of the word as if it was the pulse of his own blood.

_Emma._

Julian toyed with his seaglass bracelet, scraping rough grains of sand against the fine golden links. Remembering.

It had been a year after the Dark War had ended, and for the first time in months he couldn't face his little brothers and sisters. He couldn't hold them as they cried, and when they called out to him with fear and sadness and loss, he couldn't force himself to answer.

None of them blamed him for what happened, but he did - he would never forget throwing the blade that pierced his father's heart. He still remembered blood gushing out from the chest that had once protected him from the world, staining red the arms that had once held him so tightly. Normally he could handle the guilt - what else could he have done? - but on that first anniversary, Julian saw Andrew Blackthorn's dying eyes every time he closed his own.

How could he comfort them, when he couldn't even keep himself together?

Emma had known what to do. Emma had stayed that long night with him as he twisted and turned and screamed out for his father, for Tavvy and Dru and Livvy and Ty. For Mark and Helen. For his mother. Every time he woke up, she had held his hand and gazed at him with fierce eyes as unrelenting as the desert sky, brushing the damp hair away from his forehead. She had nightmares of her own, he knew, but that night she locked them away for him. For her parabatai.

 _I'm right here, Jules_ , she had whispered. _I'm not going anywhere._

And when he'd finally woken to see the morning light spilling in through the window, setting her tumbling golden hair aflame, she'd slipped the bracelet on his wrist with a hopeful smile. A smile marred by tears and sadness, but as sure as the rising sun.

It was a promise, unspoken. Like the words they traced on each other's skin.

_I will never leave you._

But now all Julian could see was Emma in the Institute gardens, when she said she didn't love him enough - Emma as she walked away, a hardness in her eyes that he recognised all too well, because Emma's soul mirrored his own - Emma sitting with Mark, holding his hand, touching Mark's hair like she used to touch his -

Julian unclasped the bracelet, running his fingers over the gold links that caught the sunlight, the coloured glass that reflected it away in a rainbow kaleidoscope. He felt the mindless urge to break it apart, to ruin it like Emma had ruined him. But it had become part of who he was. And wasn't she a part of him too? Weren't he and Emma forever?

If it was anyone but Mark, it would have been bearable. Barely. But Emma had chosen Mark over him, and Julian couldn't pretend to be happy for them. Maybe this was the one lie he couldn't live with; not when he was torn between feeling bitterly jealous of his older brother, and savagely betrayed by Emma.

But beneath all the anger and hurt, buried in the innermost chamber of his heart, all he could feel was a hollow ache where Emma used to be. All his life they had fitted togther so perfectly, easy as breathing, and now they were strangers. The only thing worse than the distance was the agony he felt around her; when he saw her, the pain felt like drowning. He could never get enough air into his lungs, couldn't catch his breath -

 _Emma_ , he thought, desperately -

 _Emma, please_ -

Julian waded out into the ocean Emma feared so much, the chill water eddying around his legs, the tide pulling him out to sea. He glanced at the bracelet, admiring the delicate arrangement of glass and gold. It was, he thought, almost as beautiful as the graceful lines of her face, the colour of her hair, the depth of her gold-flecked eyes...

With a choked sob, Julian let it go. He watched as it drifted through the rippling water to rest like a mirage on the sand below; and then, with a shift of the tide, it was gone. Just another lost treasure, claimed by the sea. As if it had never existed at all.

 _Emma, Emma, Emma_ -

                  - _please don't leave me_.

But the beach was empty, and the only sound Julian could hear as the sun vanished over the horizon was the crashing of the waves, as they swirled away into the abyss.

 

 

 

 


End file.
